Thursday, March 29, 2012

If you're an elected official, actual democracy is messy. It's anarchic. It does things you don't want it to do, like challenge politicians ostensibly sympathetic to your cause, propose legislative agendas inconvenient to easy goals and make you have to work harder to retain your incumbency when phoning in YEA votes on gimme legislation normally does that.

Perhaps that's why MoveOn.org has become a key organizer of The 99 Percent Spring, a group that seems just like Occupy, without all the chaos of "not mobilizing people for the 2012 Democratic slate." Because if there's one thing that is sure to harness the spirit of Occupy, it's a group that's helped elect Democrats so far triangulated toward "the center" that they'd lose 1964 primaries to Rockefeller Republicans.

Click on this baller astroturf car (credit here) to continue to the Gawker piece on astroturfed Occupy:

Wednesday morning, a man working for Mitt Romney's presidential campaign described the transition from the primaries to the general election as "a reset button. Everything changes. It’s almost like an Etch A Sketch." The man who said that was Eric Fehrnstrom, which would be fine if he were Professor Farnsworth's nemesis on Futurama or President of the Association of People Who Share the Same Name as Charlatans Groucho Marx Played. Unfortunately, he's Mitt's charlatan: Fehrnstrom is his Communications Director.

Click on Mitt's sudden uncontrollable urge to barf after hearing his own bullshit to continue to the Gawker piece:

The same week that the Trayvon Martin story finally broke into the national consciousness also saw NYPD officers dislocating protesters' thumbs and smashing heads into windows in yet another scouring of Occupy groups. Automatic contempt for certain people and styles of dress, as well as assumptions of their unlawful conduct is neither restricted to the south nor any race. But that isn't why what happened to Martin is so familiar. That familiarity has its roots in Florida's Stand Your Ground laws as well as an incident that happened years ago in Texas.

Thursday, March 15, 2012

The most recent article from The Nation's Jeremy Scahill profiled the imprisonment of Yemeni journalist Abdulelah Haider Shaye. For covering American cluster bomb strikes in Yemen and the radicalization of Yemeni citizens and their support for Al Qaeda, Shaye has been beaten and tortured, imprisoned for two years and, at America's request, seen a presidential pardon from Yemen's Ali Abdullah Saleh indefinitely tabled.

You'd think that more bloggers would be furious about this. Extending a blithe imperial hand across the globe to support the torture and imprisonment of journalists is exactly the sort of half-assed fascism they were rabid about back when George W. Bush was exporting America's headaches to our Dracula in Cairo, Hosni "Drown People in Barrels of Shit" Mubarak.

Click on the pic of Jay "Stop Snitching" Carney to continue reading on Gawker.

Tuesday, March 13, 2012

You could be forgiven if, on learning of a U.S. Army Staff Sergeant executing 16 people in villages near Kandahar, you secretly wished that he was some virulent racist—a vicious dickhead who slipped through the vetting process.

Racism, at least, would have been a kind of excuse, evidence of a critically planned process. It's almost comforting: Even the most saintly among us has harbored or inspired some racial resentment. Racism is a universal form of bullshit—a lower-social-order attitude, but at least an indicator of some ordered thinking.

Click the image of Staff Sergeant Robert Bales to continue reading at Gawker.

Thursday, March 8, 2012

One of my handlers at GQ — a stern but humane gentleman who obeys the law — had an idea: if CNN has been this bad during the rest of the campaign (and it has), then it's going to be a spangly, exploding abortion on Super Tuesday. And ordinarily, he'd be correct. Only, this time, against all odds, something went right with CNN.

Good. General Ze'evi and I take a moment to look back comprehensively on a life that the media either mistakenly, squeamishly or warily summed up as mostly benign. You know, one or two regrettable bits, but otherwise a gauzy, sunny family portrait — like what Madison Avenue thinks wheat and beaches look like when you're menstruating.

Click on the dead fraud's impression of John Lithgow from Third Rock from the Sun to be taken to the article.

Thursday, March 1, 2012

The predictive ability of presidential campaigns has been thrown out of kilter by a front-runner who can't win two contests in a row and challengers who can't win more than one on a weekly basis. Michigan didn't clarify anything. Reading meaning from Michigan is like trying to divine a source from the dust storm ejected by a Shop-Vac while politely pretending that nobody brought a device that farts anything.

Click on the Mitt & Rick cuddlebears to be taken to the Gawker article.

Thanks again to Jim Cooke for the excellent image you can see in whole by clicking the above.